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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Salted Caramels

Happy Valentine's Day!

I like to use Valentine's Day as another excuse to play with candy. I've experimented with truffles and cake balls in the past. This year I made salted caramels, pistachio cranberry white chocolate bark and peanut butter balls.

The salted caramels were a lot easier than I thought they would be. Says the girl who burned her first batch . . . Actually, the first batch burned because I was too concerned about the thermometer instead of following the visual queues given in the recipe. And actually, they weren't burned to the point of ruin they just had an overly burnt sugar smell and flavor. Still edible, just not good enough to send out in my treat packages.

When I said the caramels were easier than I thought, I was referring to getting the right texture, the right "chew". You don't want a caramel that's so hard your fillings pop out when you chomp down, but you also don't want one that's so soft it doesn't keep it's shape. I was really happy to get a nice medium.

The sea salt is a really great pair with the sweet, vanilla caramel flavor.

This recipe only uses the vanilla beans seeds, but don't discard the pod. I keep a separate container for sugar to put empty vanilla pods in to create vanilla flavored sugar. It's great for flavoring hot drinks.